3. 3. 33 of two blanks! ‘Jonson had Horace in his thoughts, and has, not without some ingenuity, parodied several loose passages of one of his satires.’—G. Gifford is apparently referring to the close of Bk. 2. Sat. 3.
3. 3. 51 vn-to-be-melted. Cf. Every Man in, Wks. 1. 36: ‘and in un-in-one-breath-utterable skill, sir.’ New Inn, Wks. 5. 404: you shewed a neglect Un-to-be-pardon’d.’
3. 3. 62 Master of the Dependances! See Introduction. pp. [lvi], [lvii].
3. 3. 69 the roaring manner. Gifford defines it as the ‘language of bullies affecting a quarrel’ (Wks. 4. 483). The ‘Roaring Boy’ continued under various designations to infest the streets of London from the reign of Elizabeth until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Spark (Somer’s Tracts 2. 266) says that they were persons prodigall and of great expence, who having runne themselves into debt, were constrained to run into factions to defend themselves from danger of the law.’ He adds that divers of the nobility afforded them maintenance, in return for which ‘they entered into many desperate enterprises.’
Arthur Wilson (Life of King James I., p. 28), writing of the disorderly state of the city in 1604, says: ‘Divers Sects of vitious Persons going under the Title of Roaring Boyes, Bravadoes, Roysters, &c. commit many insolences; the Streets swarm night and day with bloody quarrels, private Duels fomented,’ etc.
Kastril, the ‘angry boy’ in the Alchemist, and Val Cutting and Knockem in Bartholomew Fair are roarers, and we hear of them under the title of ‘terrible boys’ in the Silent Woman (Wks. 3. 349). Cf. also Sir Thomas Overbury’s Character of a Roaring Boy (ed. Morley, p. 72): ‘He sleeps with a tobacco-pipe in his mouth; and his first prayer in the morning is he may remember whom he fell out with over night.’
3. 3. 71 the vapours. This ridiculous practise is satirized in Bart. Fair, Wks. 4. 3 (see also stage directions).
3. 3. 77 a distast. The quarrel with Wittipol.
3. 3. 79 the hand-gout. Jonson explains the expression in Magnetic Lady, Wks. 6. 61.
You cannot but with trouble put your hand Into your pocket to discharge a reckoning, And this we sons of physic do call chiragra, A kind of cramp, or hand-gout.